Sunday, 16 November 2014

Remember to Remember: The Temptation of Inner Sense

Remember to Remember

The Temptation of Inner Sense

Could it be you are immortal? Could you be an immortal with amnesia?How much do you want to remember of your past? Is there anything you would rather forget? How much would you have togive up to completely forget a single memory – and how to regain what you don’t know you’ve lost?If
you are actually a reincarnating immortal, how much have you
forgotten, how and why did you forget your past – and do you want to
remember it?In a
single life you can do many different things and be many different
people to those who encounter you. The stages of life alter your
attitudes, image, self-image and perceptual reality. Are you the same
person you were when you were younger, or a child? Does that child
still dwell somewhere within you or is it sleeping or buried beneath
the detritus of time?You
were born and lived for years in the body of a small child. All that
time you were conscious, learning and aware. You were probably more
aware and sensitive than in the rest of your entire lifetime. How much
of it do you remember? Your personality and character was almost fully
formed – and fundamentally identical to your present state – before
the age of three.How
many of your past lives can you remember? If you can’t remember your
own childhood, how can you expect to recall any times further back,
beyond your birth? What was your birth into this world like?Can it be that you are immortal and that you have chosen to forget? Would you choose to remember, given the choice?The
processes that can lead to a loss of memory are many and varied. For
example head injury, a spell in a sensory deprivation chamber or
hypnosis are able to alter memory or suppress it beneath layers of
reactions that can drive the mind away from its own experiences. Painful
experiences are one motivation that can help convince you to lose
your memory. But the will to forget comes first, before the actual forgetting.

You’re the one in charge of your awareness. You have to decide to
lose yourself before you can; but that decision may be a single
traumatised moment in an entire lifetime and it may be separated by
years in time from the apparent ‘cause’ of forgetfulness, be it injury
or therapy.Almost
everyone wishes for a ‘clean slate’ at some point in their life, a
new start or another chance. It’s the temptation of innocence. The
implications of wanting a new beginning are rarely considered, but
usually involve death and rebirth, actual or mythic.Fortunately, we don’t actually get a tabula rasa – a clean slate – when we die or otherwise forget, but a palimpsest – a sheet that’s been erased to write upon again. And the underlying inscription always lurks beneath the surface scribing.More
intense memories inscribe deeper impressions in our mindscape, that
tend to emerge from beneath the single sheeted plane of (con)temporary
temporal existence. They may arrive as memory ‘flashbacks’ (often
dismissed as dreams or hallucinations), bouts of deja vu, or be the
source of unexamined compulsions. Any imagery that recurs over and
again deserves closer examination and can be a seed point from which
you can expand your recollections. Suppressed memories and their
effects are never gone. They’re always here. Wherever or whenever you
go, here you are. You may run, but you can’t hide from yourself.The
common mechanisms for self-erasure involve death and rebirth. A few
weeks in a sensory deprivation chamber removed from external stimulus
will serve to erase much of your mind. Without meditation training
and/or much self-examination, current existence dissolves in an ongoing
miasma of dreams and visions.

The Other ‘Little Death’

Every night you surrender to sleep, abandoning your willed focus on
the present moment and location and slip into dreams of other
possibilities, lives, worlds and universes. Every night you are lost to
this world. Every day you come back again. Remind you ofanything?Meditation,
lucid sleep and conscious dreaming are pathways to expand the time
your own awareness (and memory of these other realms) is available to
you. Examining your awareness on the threshold of sleep can show you
that you are more than the sum of your mundane experience. Without
such experimentation at least a third of this life is beyond your ken.Effective
meditation lifts you above the local realm of your cultural imprints,
particularly language. Real communication occurs at much deeper
levels than those available through local, temporary linguistics. The
eternal being doesn’t speak in linear languages. Words and syllables
are finite shorthand used by the immortal and ineffable to express
itself; one reason why ‘oral traditions’ are effective at
communicating truths that are all but inexpressible in the written
form.Meditation
involves stopping your thoughts, quieting the continual chatter of
the ‘monkey mind’ – the local personality that believes endless
talking and action proves it’s alive, the internal being that panics
and attempts to distract you with more thought when you ask it to shut
up. The monkey believes that peace is death and can’t be
convinced otherwise until you leapfrog over it to reach the central
throne of your own inner self, where the only real peace resides and
where true will abides. It’s this nameless core in you that survives
to go on forever, wreathed in the cloaks of personality and
experience.God doesn’t dwell in books or words. God lives in you.

The will to forget may arise from a single moment
but it’s an ongoing process. You can’t forget once, but must
continually re-forget, day by day, again and again. The amnesiac is held
between and attracted by two magnetic currents of their own
construction; the will to forget and the wish to remember. A physical or
mental trauma will be buried not once but continually as the amnesiac
allows their self to be distracted from the source of inner terror
over and again. Every time an intimation of the ‘lost’ memory appears
it’s ignored, suppressed or otherwise run from.Knowing
that there’s something you don’t recall, it’s all too easy to believe
you don’t want to remember because you’re guilty of something
horrendous. This easily becomes a motive to continue to suppress the
memory that’s trying to awaken you. But far more often the guilt is
actually imaginary and is simply a major motivating and reinforcing
mechanism of amnesia itself. It’s another tool of the monkey mind that
serves to keep you split from yourself, away from your own centre.The
wish to remember is always present and the moment of Enlightenment is
always immanent. When exploring past lives the first memories that
return are often ones that have left the deepest imprints. The
impression may be of pain or ecstasy but it will commonly be of an
intense time, often involving trauma at the end of an incarnation. These
first recollections are sometimes enough to stop the seeker from
searching further into the endless realms of experience, where wonderful
ages full of magic and bliss can be occluded by one angry moment.
Don’t put yourself off – the monkey is panicking.As
Kurt Vonnegut said, one way to get through life happily is to
concentrate on the good things. To achieve inner illumination is to see
that you are continually creating reality at every moment, from a
place beyond time and space. Your mind is always somewhere other than
where you are. Words, language and even thought are always at least one step behind reality and with them you can never apprehend NOW.To do that, you have to be here now. You have to want to
be here now. Look around, explore it will all your senses. It’s still a
beautiful world and you are God. Love yourself and all others – we’re
all in it together!

This material is published under Creative Commons Copyright – reproduction for non-profit
use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to
the work & author - and please include a (preferably
active) link to the original along with this notice. Feel free
to make non-commercial hard (printed) or software copies or
mirror sites - you never know how long something will stay
glued to the web – but remember attribution! If you like what
you see, please send a tiny donation or leave a comment – and
thanks for reading this far…